In some [[HiDPI]] environments, you may wish to use specific GTK settings for Chromium and different settings for all other applications as a result of device display scaling. Although Chromium does not fully integrate with GTK, it does use the settings within {{ic|${XDG_CONFIG_HOME}/gtk-3.0/settings.ini}}. If these settings are used by other applications and you want to use the flag {{ic|1=--force-device-scale-factor=1.5}}, change the user data location. To do this, you first create another directory for chromium configurations:

Note: Support for native client (NaCl) has been dropped in chromium version 54, see FS#51511. Opening NaCl applications will display this error message: "This plugin is not supported". The google-chromeAUR package supports NaCl.

See these twoarticles for an explanation of the differences between Chromium and Chrome.

Flash Player plugin

Widevine Content Decryption Module plugin

Widevine is Google's Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) Content Decryption Module (CDM). It is used to watch premium video content such as Netflix. It is automatically installed when using Google Chrome.

To install it for Chromium, install the chromium-widevineAUR package. Make sure Allow sites to play protected content is checked in chrome://settings/content/protectedContent.

PDF viewer plugin

Chromium and Google Chrome are bundled with the Chromium PDF Viewer plugin. If you don't want to use this plugin, check Open PDFs using a different application in chrome://settings/content/pdfDocuments.

Font rendering issues of UTF characters

UTF characters may render as boxes (e.g. simplified Chinese characters). Installing ttf-liberation will allow for the characters to be rendered as expected.

Force 3D acceleration

Warning: Disabling the rendering blacklist may cause unstable behaviour, including crashes of the host. See the bug reports in chrome://gpu.

First follow Hardware video acceleration. Then, to force 3D rendering, enable the flags: "Override software rendering list", "GPU rasterization", "Zero-copy rasterizer" in chrome://flags. Check if it is working in chrome://gpu. This may also alleviate tearing issues with the radeon driver.

If "Native GpuMemoryBuffers" under chrome://gpu mentions software rendering, you additionally need to pass the --enable-native-gpu-memory-buffers flag, or some optimizations (like the zero-copy rasterizer) won't do anything. This flag isn't available under chrome://flags - it must be passed in either the chromium-flags.conf file (as noted in Chromium/Tips and tricks#Making flags persistent) or directly on the command line.

WebGL

There is the possibility that your graphics card has been blacklisted by Chromium. See #Force 3D acceleration.

If you are using Chromium with Bumblebee, WebGL might crash due to GPU sandboxing. In this case, you can disable GPU sandboxing with optirun chromium --disable-gpu-sandbox.

Visit chrome://gpu/ for debugging information about WebGL support.

Chromium can save incorrect data about your GPU in your user profile (e.g. if you use switch between an Nvidia card using Optimus and Intel, it will show the Nvidia card in chrome://gpu even when you're not using it or primusrun/optirun). Running using a different user directory, e.g, chromium --user-data-dir=$(mktemp -d) may solve this issue. For a persistent solution you can reset the GPU information by deleting ~/.config/chromium/Local\ State.

Password prompt on every start with GNOME Keyring

Chromecasts in the network are not discovered

You will need to enable the Media Router Component Extension in chrome://flags/#load-media-router-component-extension.

Losing cookies and passwords when switching between desktop environments

If you see the message Failed to decrypt token for service AccountId-* in the terminal when you start Chromium, it might try to use the wrong password storage backend. This might happen when you switch between Desktop Environments.